Agent Technology is the latest paradigm of software engineering
methodology. The development of autonomous, mobile, and intelligent
agents brings new challenges to the field. Agent technologies and
multi-agent-systems are one of the most vibrant and active research
areas of computer science. At the same time commercial applications
of agents are gaining attention. The construction of artificial
(agent) societies leads to questions that already have been asked for
human societies. Computer Scientists have adopted terms like
emerging behavior, self-organization, and evolutionary theory in an
intuitive manner. Multi-agent-system researchers have started to
develop agents with "social" abilities and complex "social" systems.
However, most of these systems lack the foundation of the
social sciences. It is the intention to bring together
researchers from computer science as well as the social sciences who
see their common interest in social theories for the construction of
multi-agent-systems.

The workshop took place during the First International Joint
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (
AAMAS 2002
) in Bologna, Italy July 16, 2002.